I am flying a big, puffy, floaty student canopy, gentle and forgiving, and thats fine, except it doesnt flare for shit...I can't even get close to a stand-up landing... In this case would there be a huge problem with grabbing a wrap or 2 on the brake lines so I can get a bit more ass on the flare? I have tried flaring early, slowly, fast and low, and every thing in between...its a 288 Manta... they brag about being imposssible to stall, but Im tired of sliding in on my butt. I must say tho, my PLF is looking great!

Your question can't be anwsered online. Nobody on here knows if the brake lines are set too short, or too long. The canopy could be a sacked out piece of shit that isn't going to flare and land well no matter what you do.

Lazarus, I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. But please please be careful. I was jumping a 260 Navigator that was "ragged out" and all of my landings were HARD PLF's until one day it bit my sorry ass and I ended up with a nice titanium rod in my right shinbone.

Now can I prove that the chute was ragged out? NOPE! I don't have enough experience then nor do i have enough now. But I do know that right after my accident two people with thousands of jumps, jumped it and both agreed it was ragged out and cut the lines and the parachute has gone missing.......

But such is life and no hard feeling on my part...no one knew and i was not smart enough to ask.

So that said, I would suggest you get on another parachute ASAP! A parachute with no flare is like a car with no breaks. It's just not safe. Now it could just be lines or it could just be you but.....talk to your instructor ASAP get some videos of your landings, have a rigger check out the lines and have someone else jump it.

thanks, bro...appreciate the input. It is almost certainly my lack of experience. Others have had good landings with this same rig, I am just green as grass and wondering if I should try doing stuff I have seen others do...I'll figure this stuff out eventually!

Student canopies are generally set so they are impossible to stall. Taking a couple wraps negates this. If you stall the canopy on landing, you can break yourself. Plus, if you have wraps around your hands, how are you going to let go if you want to perform a cutaway?

If you have trouble landing, ask your instructors how you can improve. Get video of your landings, and find someone to critique them.

Sliding in on your butt is quite dangerous BTW. You should be doing a PLF if you cannot get the timing right just yet. But do not land on your butt as you can damage your spine that way. Always land on your feet. Again, ask your instructors for feedback. Sounds like you really need it.

There does seem to be an alarming practice within the sport called “taking wraps” in the steering lines. Essentially, this means wrapping the steering lines around your hands to shorten them and thus allowing the canopy to stall. We would suggest that this is an inherently dangerous technique that should not be used due to the possibility of being unable to disentangle your hands should the need to cutaway or any other occasion arise where you need to let go of the steering toggles. If you do seem to have an inordinate amount of bow in your steering lines, it is acceptable to take your hands out of the steering toggles and move your grip upwards to the point where the steering toggles are attached to the steering lines i.e. so that the steering line goes between your fingers with your grip being at the top of the steering toggle.

This is the BPA's advice, not the USPA's. If you're interested, you read the whole thing online here

I think I determined that some of the student rigs that I jumped had different flares even though the canopy was the same model and size. It was very late in my student program that I started seeing the trend that on some days I PLFed everything and other days they were nice landings (wind included).

I was very content to just PLF because I considered it a very safe thing to do. I almost could never arrest the vertical decent of the student rig. I just got into the habit of falling down. More than once an instructor told me I could have stood it up. I told him it was not one of my a landing priorities. (sort of a joke but true)

thanks for all of the advice guys...sounds like it is probably a bad idea, I just need to learn a hell of a lot more about all of this...every jump, I learn a little more, eventually I might actually have a clue what the hell I'm doing.

Student canopies are generally set so they are impossible to stall. Taking a couple wraps negates this. If you stall the canopy on landing, you can break yourself. Plus, if you have wraps around your hands, how are you going to let go if you want to perform a cutaway?

If you have trouble landing, ask your instructors how you can improve. Get video of your landings, and find someone to critique them.

Sliding in on your butt is quite dangerous BTW. You should be doing a PLF if you cannot get the timing right just yet. But do not land on your butt as you can damage your spine that way. Always land on your feet. Again, ask your instructors for feedback. Sounds like you really need it.

THAT^^^^^ is what you need to take away from this thread.

I don't know of an instructor anywhere that would tell a student to take wraps. Stalls on landing are not fun and very well could be career-ending.

I don't know of an instructor anywhere that would tell a student to butt slide. Do you know anyone that has had a broken tailbone? Fractured vertebrae? crushed discs? Paralysis??

Taking wraps isn't quite as evil as it can be made out. While it is true that wraps would interfere with chopping, if you do so only at 200' on final that isn't a concern.

Someone who knows what they are doing may indeed take wraps if they feel that the control lines are too long for them, whether it is an old F-111 style canopy or something newer. That can help the flare somewhat. (But if there isn't slack in the control lines to begin with, you'd be slowing the canopy down from full flight with a wrap -- counter productive. The way to get around that is to take the wrap shortly before you are about to flare to minimize the speed loss.)

One can practice hard flares up high with a single wrap, to see if the canopy will start to stall during the flare (or if held a little longer).

The problem with all this is that nobody wants to tell a student a way to make their canopy less safe and get closer to a stall! So, at what stage would one start to dare to suggest someone start using a wrap?? Maybe at a minimum after they have started to practice getting close to a stall up high, when they've already formally learned stall recovery methods. With a big docile canopy one may not really be practicing even an incipient stall without taking a wrap. But then you get into the cutaway issue. You shouldn't need to from a simple stall on a big canopy, but it gets hard to advise any student to do it.

So it's almost like you have to get your A license first, because then you're responsible for yourself...

Once you get more experience landing you'll get a feel for whether a canopy is just starting to fall back into a stall. Not a problem if you are already touching the ground, maybe a little hard if 12" off the ground, but you don't want to do it higher.

On a poor performing canopy without a lot of energy, you may tend to need a sharper, lower flare. One can't just start gradually flaring higher up.

So you're now armed with some info on flaring with a wrap... "but you didn't hear it from me and I'll deny everything."

For over 2,000 jumps I would land after “taking a wrap”. I would set my canopy up for this scenario. When active I did a lot of demos, some of them into very tight targets. I would often be in deep, deep brakes making a steep “accuracy approach”. By setting the brake lines a little long I did not have to worry as much about stalling out. At the right time I would let the brakes up and let the canopy fly and take the wrap as I flared.

Disclaimer: while this worked well for me over the years I would not recommend it to jumpers with little canopies or little experience.

thanks for your comments and advice. I have very little xperience, but actually feel very comfortable flying slowly, in half brakes and doing brake turns and riser turns...I will be looking at deep brakes on my next few jumps, with clear traffic and plenty of altitude. I may be able to get the timing right on some nice gentle stalls, so I can learn the finer points of flaring with proper timing. I know I don't want to actually stall on final, just get a zero descent glide a few inches off the ground... easy to say! I am in no hurry to stop breathing, so I will be proceeding with plenty of caution. If the brake lines aren't actually detuned, then is simply a case of my timing sucks- which is highly probable. To be honest, I only have 6 AFF landings; 4 buttslides and 2 PLFs, so I still have a huge skillset still to learn...I'll figure it out soon enough

so after today's first jump, I looked at the canopy tag...its a Manta 290 zero P...it doesn't appear to be sacked out, and I was able to do some gentle stalls at altitude. (I also did some very nice spins down from 3000...sweet!) I can only come to one conclusion - it ain't the canopy, it's my timing. My timing sucks, but it is slowly getting better. You can read about it, watch youtube, watch other jumpers, but the only way to learn the timing is to do it.

so after today's first jump, I looked at the canopy tag...its a Manta 290 zero P...it doesn't appear to be sacked out, and I was able to do some gentle stalls at altitude. (I also did some very nice spins down from 3000...sweet!) I can only come to one conclusion - it ain't the canopy, it's my timing. My timing sucks, but it is slowly getting better. You can read about it, watch youtube, watch other jumpers, but the only way to learn the timing is to do it.

I coulda swore I was gonna get a standup today - until I didn't. LOL!

You must remember that you have only tried this 11 times with a total of about 10 minutes under canopy. If possible have someone video your landings and go over the video with an experienced pilot.

I got 2 today...would have been 3 but that whole money thing keeps getting in the way... every dive gets better, and I get better with every dive! Sometimes my progress is pretty dang slow, at other times, I don't suck too bad...I'll get there eventually!

I jump a 300 Student rig, i was having trouble until my instructor told me to keep looking up and when the ground is the same height from your feet as the canopy is from your head. Then flare. Worked like a charm. Goodluck and have fun. Thats what its all about right.

... every dive gets better, and I get better with every dive! Sometimes my progress is pretty dang slow, at other times, I don't suck too bad...I'll get there eventually!

Got some news for you.

That won't change.

Presuming you continue to jump, and continue to try to improve and learn (which is what you should do), you will have days that everything goes perfectly and you seem to learn everything you try on the first attempt. And you will have days where...

... every dive gets better, and I get better with every dive! Sometimes my progress is pretty dang slow, at other times, I don't suck too bad...I'll get there eventually!

Got some news for you.

That won't change.

Presuming you continue to jump, and continue to try to improve and learn (which is what you should do), you will have days that everything goes perfectly and you seem to learn everything you try on the first attempt. And you will have days where...

That doesn't happen.

LOL! that ain't news, bro...I have accepted a few facts about myself - sometimes, I am the slow learner of the bunch, sometimes I do OK, and sometimes I am amazed that I haven't managed to kill myself with my moronicity (is that a word?)...but I love this shit, and I will continue to jump, learn, improve, and do lots of PLFs until I get it right!